Zalman and the Official Declaration

Tales of the Chelm First Ward

Zalman the Learned had long struggled to follow the stories in the Doctrine and Covenants. The Torah had never been a problem for him. To be sure, there were some false starts. In the first chapter, for example, the world was created, and then in the second chapter the world was created again, and then by chapter 6, God was getting ready to start the whole thing over a third time. Still, there was some definite forward motion, complete with periodic chapters of begats to show the passage of time. And then from Abraham through Moses the story moved along rather nicely before the plot wandered off in the wilderness.

The Book of Mormon was trickier. Having been born long before there were medications to help with such things, Nephi was temperamentally incapable of sticking to a subject. He was always interrupting his own story (and the supporting streams of complaints about his brothers) with long visions of the future and longer quotes from the prophets of the past. For the first two books, it was often difficult to remember what century you were in. But if you somehow made it to Mosiah, the Book of Mormon’s story was not only discernible but actually exciting. You got to see the chosen people be brave and foolish and thoughtful and naive and proud and stupid, just like covenant peoples always are. It didn’t always make sense, but at least it had shape. What more could you ask from a book, even if it was God’s? 

Try as he might, though, Zalman didn’t know what to do with the Doctrine and Covenants. He could never find the thread to hold onto. The first section took place in the chronological middle, then the second jumped back in time. If you made it past the first few to section 8, you got some really good stuff about Moses and Aaron, but pretty soon after that, the book started repeating itself worse than Genesis. If he didn’t always nod off while studying them, Zalman would swear that sections 15 and 16 said the exact same thing!

What’s more, the Doctrine and Covenants never really seemed to pick up its pace. The Saints didn’t make it to Kirtland until section 41. Then it took them all the way until section 124 to get to Nauvoo, before rushing off toward Salt Lake at the book’s very end—if any readers made it that far. Zalman knew he was supposed to seek knowledge by faith as well as study, but on each attempt, he didn’t have quite enough to carry him to the final page of the Doctrine and Covenants.  

One year, it occurred to Zalman that if reading left to right wasn’t working, it might be better to try right to left, like with the Torah when he was young. And so it was that, on a January morning when Zalman was taking his turn teaching Sunday School class, the members of the Chelm Ward found themselves discussing the 1978 document known as Official Declaration #2.

Things went well enough in their discussion of the declaration’s first paragraph, where the prophets said they were grateful that the people of many nations had responded to the restored gospel. Members of the Chelm ward, like so many unfortunate people around the world, lived in a nation. And they had certainly responded to the restoration.  Many still remembered Heshel talking about a great repair after he met the missionaries while buying blintzes in Ukraine. As moderately attentive Jews, they already knew about tikkun olam, or repairing the world. It only made sense that religion was just as broken as the next thing and needed at least a few centuries of fixing up.

It was when Zalman moved on to the restoration of the priesthood, and what the prophets had done in 1978 to repair the Church, that class turned contentious.

“I have a concern,” Brother Cohen said.

Well, of course he did. Everyone knew that before he raised his hand. It was the sort of thing so reliable that you could bear testimony of it before the ward on Fast Sunday: you knew, with every fiber of your being, that Brother Cohen was going to have a concern. But if predictability was a sin, the whole Church was guilty, so Zalman went ahead and called on Brother Cohen.

“This section reminds me of a serious question,” Brother Cohen mused. “I have never understood what is so heavy about the priesthood that this Church expects everyone to carry it.”

He moved a hand to his chest as if the thought itself caused him pain. “Things worked just fine in the priestly lines when there were only a few of us. I have proposed to the bishop, and will propose it now again, that—should our dear Chelm Ward see fit—my sons and I would be more than happy to hold all the priesthood on our own.”

Menachem Menasche’s hand shot up before Cohen had even finished. Menasche! It was well known he thought of himself as more learned, even, than Zalman. Zalman looked desperately for an excuse to ignore that hand, lifted up as it surely was in pride, and call on someone else. But no one would even make eye contact. It would be out of the frying pan of Cohen’s favorite complaint, then, and into the fire of Menasche. Zalman only hoped, against all precedent, that this comment would be quick.

“We are, of course, aware of Brother Cohen’s views on the priesthood,” Menachem said. “But this passage is not about the priests or the Levites at all, but about a very specific problem in the history of the Saints in America, where people were afraid of Africans and refused to ordain them.”

“Afraid?” asked Leah Kantor. “For what reason?” 

Before Zalman could answer, Brother Menasche pointed to the open book before him. “As we read in the introduction to this section,” he observed, “the position of the Church, which is repeated in the magazines I have studied and the talks I have read, is that we don’t know anything.”

“Yes, yes,” Zalman said, eager to regain control of the class. “And as anyone can observe, it’s very easy to go from knowing nothing to holding firmly to a prejudice. The whole thing makes a certain sort of sense.”

“I still think it was a bad idea for Americans to hold the priesthood,” Brother Cohen interjected.

But the class was ready to move on. “Why the prejudice against Africans?” Tzipa asked. “Don’t people usually blame their problems on Jews?”

Zalman the Learned spoke up before Menasche could bore the class further with minutiae from the history of the United States. “There must not have been many Jews in America yet,” he said. “If there were Jews, of course, they would have hated Jews,” he assured her, “but there is so much hate in the world and there are simply not enough Jews to go around. As we read in the Torah itself, it happened once that Moses married an Ethiopian woman. At that time, Miryam and Aaron objected, believing it unfair of Moses to make her people, too, hateful in the eyes of the Egyptians. But the voice of God came and rebuked them, telling them they would not be the only people hated for his name’s sake.”

The last details of that story were not exactly written on any scroll, but Zalman was still quite proud of his quick little midrash. His role as a teacher was to bring each tangent back to the scriptures, or at least close enough that the wandering sheep of the Chelm ward could drink from the well. (Unless they were quite attached to wandering, which at least one of them usually was.) “It’s not that I object to any particular deacon or elders quorum president,” Brother Cohen insisted. “But without the appropriate lineage, I wonder why we hand our fast offerings to young Gimpel or take assignments from our dear President Gronam.”

“I object!” shouted President Gronam. “I object to the testimony of Brother Cohen! He is degrading my quorum’s dignity.”

“This is not a courtroom,” Zalman the Learned reminded president Gronam. “Though I am sure that, speaking in general, we do sustain you in this ward.” He turned to Brother Cohen. “Certainly in the Church, we believe in ordaining worthy men to the priesthood, whether their name is Levy or Cohen or Johnson or Smith. Once a field is ready to harvest, it’s always one hailstorm away from being flat, one soggy week away from rotting. To get the job done in time, we’re all called to the work.”

“And what a disaster!” Brother Cohen protested. “Consider a mohel as a comparison. If there happened to be a large number of baby boys born in a year, would you hand everyone a pocketknife? No, you would stick to the families with experience. The ones who have been in the business for generations.” He sighed theatrically. “You know I love this Church,” he added, “but I think that when Joseph Smith ordained anyone at all to the priesthood, he was making a terrible mistake.”

“And as we know,” Zalman countered, “we came to this earth to make mistakes. Mistakes help us grow. It’s written in the hymns. Or the lessons. Or perhaps even somewhere in the long middle of this great and disorienting book of Doctrine and Covenants.” 

But Brother Cohen only shook his head in disbelief. “Why do the young people today love so much to make mistakes?” he asked. “In the old days, mistakes could kill you. Touch the ark without permission: stricken dead. Come into the priests’ court in the temple without precautions: instantly dead. God is dangerous business.” He wagged one finger toward Zalman in an emphasis of rebuke. “With God, it’s a safety issue to keep most people at a respectful distance. In the old days, priests handled fatal power! We had a whole code for how to safely handle the divine.” He snorted. “Now how many of our dear priesthood holders make a careful study of Leviticus?”

Zalman suspected the number was slightly greater than zero, but did not think that saying so would make a strong defense.

Menachem Menasche raised his hand again and did not wait to be called on before beginning to speak. God willing, somewhere in the Book of Leviticus there might be a curse on such behavior. “I am sure that many people in this day and age, not to mention this room, would love to keep far away from God and from priests of every kind,” Menachem said. “But God calls us now to enter his presence. And by your own example of the temple’s inner court,” he told Brother Cohen, “we do so by first becoming a kingdom of priests and priestesses. We may be clumsy. And God doesn’t want to be taken lightly. But I don’t see another way.”

“It makes sense to cast the net wider and wider.” Yossel added from the back row, “If God’s fishermen stopped with the first load, the sun would beat down on their catch and pretty soon it would start to stink.”

Zalman nodded at this. He may not know American history like Brother Menashe or priesthood history like Brother Cohen, but rotten fish was rotten fish. “You see? There is a time and a purpose for everything.”

“It still doesn’t seem fair,” Tzipa blurted out. “I mean . . . what does the example of the Levites have to do with this declaration?” She looked to Zalman for help. “It is one thing to have just one tribe bear the priesthood or step into the inner courts of the temple,” she explained. “It would be quite another to give it to every tribe and leave just one out.”

The question stopped Zalman. Since he first heard about it, he had assumed this business with the priesthood was part of the great scriptural pattern of God prodding his prophets to get over themselves. God had to drag Jonah to Nineveh. Peter got knots in his stomach at the thought of eating with Gentiles. A long string of modern-day prophets, it reasoned, might need some pushing to take the gospel to all peoples. But in the case of this very first revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants (or the last, if you read the book left to right), the trouble was not with the world, but with a group of those who numbered themselves among God’s people. Zalman turned to the class. “Is there a better comparison in the scriptures?” he asked. “Can anyone think of a story when just one tribe was separated from the rest and treated badly?”

There was a pause as the collected great minds of Chelm pondered the problem. Zalman flipped through the pages of scripture in his mind, considering the many times God’s covenant people acted less like sheep than asses. The Book of Mormon spoke of a time when the pride of those in the Church exceeded the pride of those outside it, so there was precedent for the Saints’ arrogance. And even Moses was making a mess of his health and the people’s safety before his father-in-law, Jethro, intervened. Perhaps the failing of the modern prophets was that, being so old, they lacked the counsel of a good father-in-law. But try as he might, Zalman could not think of a direct parallel for the story his class was studying. 

Then Shayna’s eyes lit up and her hand rose victoriously into the air. “Right at the beginning, in Israel’s family, there’s the story of how Joseph’s own brothers sold him into slavery,” she said. “Perhaps this thing in America was more like that.”

Zalman sighed with relief. There was a saying about the Talmud: turn it and turn it, for everything is in it. The four sets of Latter-day Saint scripture were not nearly so long as the Talmud, but there was still quite a bit there if you looked at it long enough. “Yes,” Zalman said. “This is an excellent point. Nothing stirred Judah to greater works than his guilt over betraying his brother. And so may it be with us!”

To begin on the right side of the Doctrine & Covenants, Zalman realized, was indeed the best way to approach the book. The class was beginning with a story like Joseph and his brothers. Next, there would be stories of oppression and captivity, then a crossing of the wilderness. Traveling backwards through time, the Saints could enter their promised land in Missouri and raise up a temple there, before being scattered out into the world, like exiles in Babylon, with only the thought of Zion to warm them. What stranger proof could there be that God was in the long history of this faith than the way the scriptures themselves formed one great chiasmus.

James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.

Artwork by David Habben.

To order the complete Tales of the Chelm First Ward, click here.

Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction